The other side of enjoyment: short-circuiting marketing and creativity in the experience economy

Abstract

The notion of experience economy asserts that staging the most mundane consumption practise as individualized entertainment adds value to the producer and consumer alike (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).This article questions this assumption of mere added value. Probing into an interplay between a marketing fantasy and a customer movement passionately engaging with its promise, it draws attention to a structural inability to enjoy the pleasures that the experience economy revolves around. Invoking the theoretical apparatus outlined by Lacan in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (2007), the analysis sheds light on a social dynamics regulating this impossibility. This brings to the fore a range of ethical, political and economic consequences left largely untended by the literature, and dwelling on the other side of the lustrous enjoyment that so easily captures our imagination.